It's been a long time. As you can probably guess, I'm not the eighteen-year-old who first drafted this blog anymore. The thirty-one-year-old behind the keyboard now is wincing at some of the smug bad taste of this blog's original author.
For anyone wondering about the initial story arc, neither Nerdyshirts nor Barnes ever got back to me. I've seen another shirt mill producing a replication of the shirt in a different font with proper alignment and kerning, which I think undercuts some of the charm.
A later visit to Comic-Con included me seeing a few folks wearing the knockoffs.
The original shirt is still in a faraway corner of my closet, the letters cracking and falling away with the passage of time.
This post, however, is not to rehash the past, but to give a corroborating record to establish authenticity, a sort of faux-provenance. I'm going to be exploring options for minting and selling the original photo, and perhaps other media related to the shirt, as an NFT. So if anyone out there wants to own a piece of pre-2010 Internet history, here's a quasi-certificate of authenticity to go with it.
With love,
Aaron
